Accurate prediction of turns, such as phrases or sentences, in a dialog between two entities, improves dialog generation, machine translation of dialogs and speech recognition. For example, an automated agent, such as a mobile robot, may perform one or more complex tasks where the automated agent is engaged in conversation with a human and has several options for responding to the human. Dialog prediction allows the automated agent to choose the best response option based on the conversation history. Additionally, a machine translation of a dialog that fails to account for dialog context leads to incoherent output. Further, the accuracy of a speech recognition system is improved when the speech recognition system has contextual knowledge of an upcoming utterance to expect.
However, dialogs where two entities exchange information, such as phrases or sentences, are generally impromptu and have minimal explicit structure. While conventional techniques allow prediction of subsequent phrases or terms in a monologue, these techniques generally rely on determining global coherence for the monologue in its entirety using lexical techniques or segmenting the monologue into topics using text-tiling. However, the minimal structure of a dialog impairs the effectiveness of these conventional techniques.
Inclusion of a turn, such as a phrase or a sentence, in a dialog affects the coherence of the dialog. Conventional analysis of dialog coherence focuses on local coherence between adjacent turns, such as sentences or phrases, or within a turn. While coherence of a monologue in its entirety can be determined, the reduced structure of a dialog prevents use of techniques for determining monologue coherence in dialog prediction. This inability of conventional methods to account for overall dialog coherence further impairs prediction of turns, such as sentences or phrases, used in a dialog.
Hence, there is a need for a system or method for predicting a turn for addition to an existing dialog while maintaining coherence with the existing dialog.